Proud to be Canadian

Now it's my time to boast. Read below for recent news on how great Canada is (in case you didn't already know:)

Taken from
http://www.english-vancouver.com/canada-human-development/

"Vancouver is Third in World in Annual Quality of Life Survey

Vancouver ranked third overall in the 2005 annual "Quality of Life Survey", published by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. This year's score matches Vancouver's previous score in the 2004 Quality of Life survey.

Geneva and Zurich, Switzerland were tied for first place with scores of 106.5. Vancouver's score was 106, which tied it with Vienna, Austria. Other Canadian cities, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal , and Calgary took 14th, 20th, 22nd and 25th place, respectively.

All five Canadian cities in the survey were praised for their relatively high levels of "personal safety and security" and for being in a politically stable country, according to a report from CBC News (see below).

Vancouver 3rd in world in quality of life survey
CBC News, March 14, 2005
World-wide quality of life survey
Mercer Human Resource Consulting, March 14, 2005

For almost a decade (up to the year 2001), Canada was ranked number one among 175 countries in the United Nation's Quality of Life survey.

Canada still manages to maintain a relatively high standard today. According to the 2004 UN Human Development Index, Canada was ranked fourth overall."

Well pretty darn good eh? Who said we were modest people...

New Pics- Week with Renan

I have recently put up pics under the 'trips' section of the pics from the week Renan was here. It includes pics of Istanbul, Pamukkale, Ephesus and a few from Izmir. I will be putting a lot more pics up in the next two weeks.

http://www.monicastravels.com/album/Trips/Week%20With%20Renan/index.html

Watch out, the transvestites are armed with pepper spray!

It seems the past few weeks, we (trainees) have had some bad luck with theft. For three consecutive weekends one of us has had something stolen. First, Nikki got her brand new cell phone stolen straight from her pocket as we were walking down Istiklal for a night on the town. Next, it was me getting my nice, warm jacket stolen from a club (the cell phone my host family had lent me was in the pocket). Finally, Nikki’s good friend Alex, who was visiting from her traineeship in Czech, got her wallet magically stolen from her purse. We suspect it could have happened while we were being pepper sprayed by transvestites while negotiating cover for a bar. Apparantly we were being too loud and so they came out started kicking one of the guys and all of a sudden everyone was coughing, weezing and crying. Some people got it straight in the face too. Ahhhhhhhh. One has to be soooo careful here. And as foreigners we are prime targets. Well I guess these things happen while you travel regardless of all the precautions you take.

Rolf Potts (ya ya ok you knew that was coming) got robbed and drugged in Istanbul and wrote a piece about it called ‘Turkish Knockout’. It ends well….so here’s the excerpt:

“Anyone who's been robbed clean overseas will know that the days following your robbery provide a kind of masochistic therapy. Amidst the tedious hours of down time in various police stations, consulates, and traveler's check offices, you have ample time to re-examine each individual thread of your demise.

To retrospectively pluck any one of these threads is to watch the robbery neatly unravel into some idealized parallel future. It's a torturous, yet irresistible exercise.
In time, this exercise of memory renders things relative: it makes you realize that things could have been much, much worse; it makes you realize that, bad experiences, on the road or otherwise, help you appreciate good experiences otherwise forgotten. You come out, in the end, with a sense of wonder at all those other, un- seen moments when the threads of chance fluttered-nearly connecting, but not-just past the periphery of your life.

And then, once you have replaced your passport and filed away the lessons learned,you resume weaving. Because you now know there is a certain holiness in the notion that those threads exist at all.”

Rolf Potts writes an independent travel columnjor National Geographic Adventure, and his work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing, Cond6 Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, Travelers'Tales Greece, Not So Funny When It Happened, and Salon. com. He is also the author ofVagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Hefeels somewhat at home in Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, and Wichita, Kansas.

New Template

Well, I've decided to change the template of the blog to make it easier on the eyes (see I do listen to you Mom). This blog is getting some action, super sweet. I've been waiting to burn some of my friends' pics to put up since my camera died a few months ago, so for those of you who have them send them on.

I'm waiting on a tentative job offer from a European country...hope I get a confirmation soon. Other than that life has gone on pretty much as usual: work on the weekdays, at night I usually read and/or watch some tv and end up passing out pretty early, yikes that's definitely a change. For the weekends, I've been heading to the dorms in Tophane. Recently the new residence buildings for Bilgi university students were finally completed and so the trainees moved from the Gypsie Ghetto of Kasimpasa to the nargile scented Boshorus area of Tophane! The whole situation is a wonderfully drastic change from the coed students (no more jungle boyz and Peeping Toms), to more spacious, clean rooms with great big windows, private bathroms and a view of the Galata Tower! Nice nice arrangements.

This weekend is Nikki's (12th) and Aakash's (11th) birthdays...so HAPPY BIRTHDAY GUYS!!!